Software Catalog – Diversity

In addition to the software in the highlights section, the team develops many tools and prototypes to support empirical research.
Please have a look to the sofware listed in the Inria Software Information Base about the Diversity research axis of the team. (Sorted in alphabetical order)

Functional description: This web site aims at informing visitors about browser fingerprinting and possible tools to mitigate its effect, as well as at collecting data about the fingerprints that can be found on the web. It collects browser fingerprints with the explicit agreement of the users (they have to click on a button on the home page). Fingerprints are composed of 17 attributes, which include regular HTTP headers as well as the most recent state of the art techniques (canvas fingerprinting, WebGL information).

Scientific description: The amiunique web site has been deployed in the context of the DiverSE's research activities on browser fingerprinting and how software diversity can be leveraged in order to mitigate the impact of fingerprinting on the privacy of users. The construction of a dataset of genuine fingerprints is essential to understand in details how browser fingerprints can serve as unique identifiers and hence what should be modified in order to mitigate its impact privacy. This dataset also supports the large-scale investigation of the impact of web technology advances on fingerprinting. For example, we can analyze in details the impact of the HTML5 canvas element or the behavior of fingerprinting on mobile devices.

The whole source code of amiunique is open source and is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.

Impact:
The website has been showcased in several professional forums in 2014 and 2015 (Open World Forum 2014, FOSSA'14, FIC'15, ICT'15) and it has been visited by more than 100000 unique visitors in one year.

Functional description: Billions of people browse the web all over the world and, we practically all use a different browser since we personalise our own over time. Such minor modifications are like an individual fingerprint that emerging spyware is beginning to collect without our knowledge.

While it is easy enough to detect, block and erase cookies, browser fingerprinting is much more versatile and transparent to the user. This raises concerns over privacy. Inria's Diverse team proposes an innovative solution based on software diversity, to mitigate the privacy concerns of browser fingerprinting.